To provide for high scan rates, many conventional raster output scanners utilize a multi-faceted rotating polygon as the scanning element. Such scanners also include a positive pyramid error compensating cylinder lens, known also as a wobble correction cylinder lens, to minimize scan-to-scan spot position errors due to angular alignment errors in the cross-scan plane between adjacent facets of the scanning polygon.
For many advanced raster output scanner applications, optical systems that are smaller and of lower cost than conventional optical systems are required. A reduction in size of the optical scanning system with no corresponding change in scan length means that scan angles, i.e., the angle through which the beam must be deflected, are increased. Due to the increased scan angle, the sagittal field curvature produced by the positive pyramid error compensating cylinder lens increases to objectionable levels which require correction.
One experimental attempt to compensate for the increased sagittal field curvature produced by the pyramid error compensating cylinder lens provided a negative cylinder lens of low refractive index near the positive cylinder lens. However, the two cylinder lenses do not combine to satisfactorly eliminate sagittal field curvature. In another attempt to eliminate sagittal field curvature, the positive cylinder lens was curved in the tangential plane to become a toroid. The curvature and power of the toroid were small in the tangential direction, so that making the cylinder lens into a toroid had only a slight effect on tangential field curvature, while it had a large effect on sagittal field curvature since the power in the sagittal plane is large. Thus, this toroidal bending approach reduces the problem of sagittal field curvature, but a toroid is expensive to make out of glass, and replicating it out of plastic would appear to require expensive and lengthy research. Accordingly, other, less costly, ways in which to solve the sagittial field curvature produced by the positive pyramid error compensating cylinder lens is desired.